Articles - > Xbox 360 H.264 Conversion Guide

Title:	Xbox 360 H.264 Conversion Guide
Description:	This guide shows you how to convert DVD/AVI/DivX/XviD/MOV files to H.264 video for Xbox 360 compatibility
Author/Publisher:	DVDGuy
Ease of use:	Intermediate
Software Used:	MeGUI, Nero Digital Audio Decoder/Encoder, TVersity
Page Viewed:	491299 times

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karto: Great guide! I've been trying to...
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Page 2 of 8: DVD/MPEG-2 Conversion

Step 2: DVD/MPEG-2 Conversion

The instructions in this step are for conversion from a MPEG-2 source (eg. DVD, SVCD). If the file you want to convert to H.264 is not a DVD or MPEG-2 source (eg. AVI/DivX/XviD/MOV), you can skip to "Step 3" right now.

If you are using a commercial DVD, you will need to rip the DVD to your hard-drive. Because ripping a commercial DVD may be illegal in your country, we won't cover these steps here.

For more information on all the settings of MeGUI, please refer to the MeWiki website.

The next thing we need to do is to use MeGUI's D2V Creator tool to create a D2V file needed for MeGUI/AviSynth to handle MPEG-2 files. This step is required only for MPEG-2 files - all other types of inputs do not require a D2V file and can be loaded straight into AviSynth and as mentioned before, you can skip this step and go to the next page/step (Step 3: AviSynth Script Creator).

Start MeGUI. I like to first clear the job queues of previously finished jobs. This is optional, but it might help to make things clearer. To do this, click on the "Queue" tab and then click on the "Clear" button.

From the "Tools" menu, select "D2V Creator". In the "Video Input" section, load the first VOB file of the movie titleset (the rest of the files in the set will be loaded automatically). You will get an error message about not being able to find DVD Decrypter generated info files, this is fine (as we did not use DVD Decrypter's IFO mode) and press "OK" to skip this error.

Select which audio track(s) to demux - you can select more than one track if you want the encoded file to have multiple audio tracks. Alternatively, you can just select the demux all the tracks and then choose the correct audio track(s) later on.

The default save directory is the same directory as your loaded DVD VOB files - change this if you want to. Select both the "On completion load files", "and close" checkboxes and press the "Queue" button. You are now returned to MeGUI - click on the "Queue" tab and press the "Start" button to start the D2V creation. When processing has finished, the status of the queued job will read "Done" and the created D2V file will be loaded into the AviSynth Script Creator ready for the next step. This can take a while, so please be patient - the status window's progress bar may not move, but don't worry, DGIndex is working.

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Article Navigation:

Page 1: Introduction + Installation
Page 2: DVD/MPEG-2 Conversion <--
Page 3: MeGUI: AviSynth Script Creator
Page 4: MeGUI: Video Encoding Options
Page 5: MeGUI: Audio Encoding Options
Page 6: MeGUI: Cutting, Bitrate Calculator and AutoEncode
Page 7: TVersity: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360
Page 8: Zune: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360

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Great guide! I've been trying to convert some Xvid to h264 without luck - this guide worked the first time :) I only have one problem - the audio on my converted file is out of sync (<1 sec early). Any ideas what I can do? The source was an avi (Xvid / AC3) in case that matters.

Thank You! I don't like the Zune software as it is way to much bloat and the install is ridiculous when all I want is a streaming program. I recommend giving Tversity a try as I got it streaming the h264 file to the 360 without transcoding to wmv.

Yes, TVersity was updated just shortly after I had finishing writing the guide with a patch that fixed incompatibility problems with the new Spring update. The next version of the guide might use TVersity, although it is slightly troublesome to setup as it requires a port to be opened in your firewall

Also, with Tversity, I was able to stream High Profile without a problem.

Until I update the guide for TVersity, for those that want to use it but don't know where to begin, have a look at our earlier Xbox 360 DivX/XviD playback guide, which has TVersity and connecting it to Xbox 360 instructions: http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Xbox_360_DivX_XviD_Playback_Guide_page3.html

Actually it looks like TVersity is still a bit fiddly when it comes to MP4/H.264 support - it does support MP4, but it will transcode the video to WMV and then stream to the Xbox 360 - huge CPU requirements and defeats the purpose of using H.264 in the first place (poor quality). You can probably modify the profiles and tell TVersity that the Xbox 360 now supports MP4/H.264 files natively, but it's a bit fiddly (see this thread: http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?t=5138). The next release should hopefully fix all these problems, or until someone comes up with an updated profile. So for now, it's Zune.

Yes, I did the bit of fiddling with the profiles.xml and then made sure to tell it to never transcode and that's how I got the streaming to work.

Just so you know, You also need to have Avisynth 2.5 installed before you can install and update MeGUI. You can grab a copy here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2/

I've updated the guide to add in the AviSynth install

I'm converting from Xvix/DivX AVIs to H.264 MP4s, but I keep getting an error after autoencoding saying that I have an incorrect colorspace and it needs to be converted to YV12. I clicked "Yes" and continued, but the MP4 file that is outputted looks washed out when compared to the colors of the original Xvid file. Is this normal and is there a way to fix this? Also, how do I find the bitrate of my original Xvid file so I can set the bitrate in the "bitrate calculator" to 80%-90% of it's original value as you suggest? I would also like to say great guide, it's been very helpful and I would have been completely stuck without it. Now I just how MS update WMP11 to work with MP4s so I can stop using the Zune software.

rapidgame: The "incorrect colorspace" error is normal, just click yes and that should be fine. The washed out colors may be due to your encoding settings, or even your decoder (h.264 codec, player) setting. As for bit-rate, just use 80 to 90% of the original file size of the AVI file.

Thanks for the quick reply DVDGuy :-) I still can't figure out why the colors don't look the same on H.264, but the movies seem to look fine on my TV when I stream them from the Zune software. I'll try looking at the settings in my players to see if there's something I could change. I'm using FFDShow so I don't know if that might be where the problem is. When you say use 80-90% of the original AVI, is that when in the AutoEncode dialog? If I only use 80-90% of the original filesize in the bitrate calculator, that won't take into account the size required for the audio as well, would it? Thanks again for the great guide, I've been looking through Digital Digest and there's some really helpful stuff, definitely going into my bookmarks. I wish I could paragraph my comments, lol. ;-)

rapidgame: Try using Windows Media Player and then using the contrast/brightness/saturation, or just click on the ffdshow-video tray icon and configure the "picture properties" to your liking. When you specify an encoding file size in AutoEncode or the BItrate calculator, both takes into account the audio. If you keep the average bitrate as shown in the bitrate caculator between 800 and 900, quality should be pretty good (for DVD resolution video, 720x***).

Anyone know why I get the following error at the AAC Nero stage. Looking for job processor for job... Processor found! Starting job job1-1 at 11:53:10 PM Starting preprocessing of job... Preprocessing finished! encoder commandline: successfully started encoding Processing ended at 11:53:11 PM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Log for job job1-1 Channels=2, BitsPerSample=16, SampleRate=48000Hz C:\Program Files\megui\tools\neroaacenc\neroAacEnc.exe -ignorelength -lc -br 96000 -if - -of "D:\Rips\TENEN\VTS_01_1 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY 0ms.mp4"Error: MeGUI.AviSynthException: m2AudioAC3Source: error in file "D:\Rips\TENEN\VTS_01_1 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY 0ms.ac3" at MeGUI.AviSynthAudioEncoder.encode() ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The current job contains errors. Skipping chained jobs

I've followed this guide to convert from MKV files. Each source is fine but each output has gray flashes every second or so for the first 5 seconds to 3 minutes of the video. Check out the example here: http://www.echostring.com/videos/dd.avi I've been looking around for advice but so far have struck out. I'm following the tutorial completely and I've tried it on 3 different computers, all with the same results.

I've followed this guide and it works perfectly, as long as I play the files back on the PC. When I stream the files to the 360 though I tend to get audio sync problems which don't exist on the PC. Is there some setting here that can be tweaked for greater 360 compatibility?

I'm now also getting the audio sync problems (lags 1 sec) that karto reported.

rapidgame: Please post your question in our forum. In the meantime, you might have to try and demux the AVI using AviDemux, and then load in the video and audio portions separately into MeGUI

Just a tip that might be worth adding to the guide, you can embed an image in the MP4 file and it will display like album/cover art on the Xbox 360 if using the Zune software as the media server. This would be handy for DVD covers etc and I have tested it and works fine. The easy way to do this is with the freeware http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ which supports embedding JPG into MP4 files. Alternatively the manual way it to use MP4Box as MeGUI does not have any UI for this functionality. mp4box.exe -add "video.264" -add "audio.aac" -itags cover="cover.jpg" "out.mp4"

That's a great tip A8T8, in fact I'm already using mp3tag to embed cover art into our H.264 MP4 trailers. I will add additional instructions to the next version of the guide

I keep getting an mp4box.exe error during the mux mode at 98% anyway to fix this?

That is great, and I always use Moyea SWF to Video Converter to convert swf file to Xbox360